Machines Like Us S1E12 — Yoshua Bengio Doesn’t Think We’re Ready for Superhuman AI. We’re Building It Anyway.

September 24, 2024

Yoshua Bengio is one of AI’s pioneering figures. In 2018, he and two colleagues won the Turing Award – the closest thing computer science has to a Nobel Prize – for their work on deep learning. In 2022, he was the most cited computer scientist in the world. It wouldn’t be hyperbolic to suggest that AI as we know it today might not exist without Yoshua Bengio.

But in the past couple of years, Bengio has had an epiphany of sorts. And he now believes that, left unchecked, AI has the potential to wipe out humanity. So these days, he’s dedicated himself to AI safety. He’s a professor at the University of Montreal and the founder of MILA – the Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute.

Now, he spends his time pleading with the industry to slow down before it’s too late.